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30th June 2017

A couple of months back I found loads of old notes about all the old Epic Space Marine games we played, starting from back when I was in high school. I thought it would be a good idea to type them all up as best I could, and upload them all. While I was at it, I also converted the Epic-S and 40K battle reports from their PDF state to HTML, and they can be found on the Warhammer 40K page.

16th May 2017

25th April 2017

Opened up a new section all for including stuff about the board game Super Dungeon Explore. There's not much in there yet until my own rules are finished, but hopefully will get some content in there soon.

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Computer Games Blog

This is where you can read any of my irregular wafflings about computer gaming. The whole point of this blog is to help motivate me to properly finish games, whether they be recent ones or older ones I played when I was younger that I never managed to beat.

26th April 2015 - Conquering More Skum

Late last year I started to play the fun but cheesy game Terraria along with Scoob and JIK. I'd seen footage of this a few times on the net and thought it had some promise, and thanks to GOG (again), we could now try it out for ourselves.
So we booted up the game and made a world, which we called Skum. Of course.

Best explained as a kind-of Minecraft clone, though from a side-scrolling perspective rather than in first person, this somewhat simple looking game is actually quite deep, with massive, randomly generated worlds to explore, things to build, and enemies to battle.

The main aim of the game is to continue to build up your strength and equipment so you can fight the next boss, which in turn usually unlocks some other resource or equipment you can find to help with the next boss. In order to help with this, you can build a base that NPC characters can move into, who then provide you with other resources or services.
Said base building can be slow and frustrating, and at first I had problems creating a layout that the NPCs would navigate properly. But I constantly found myself adding and tweaking over the weeks. I could easily see myself going mental and building something crazy, if I could find the time. Or be bothered.

The combat is very easy and simple, but if there's a lot of enemies on screen it can get a little difficult to follow what's going on, especially in boss fights. It also didn't help that I kept getting weird lag on my machine, during which other players, NPCs and enemies would jump all over the screen as the game caught up, making it hard to hit them or dodge away. I initially thought it was down to me hosting the server at the same time, as my much slower computers that were connecting to me had no such lag. In the end, this weird lag went away when I tweaked some of the video settings. I have no idea why the slower machines were fine, nor do I know which setting fixed it, as I'm not sure what I changed. But it worked.

There were also a bunch of weird bugs that only seemed to show up during multiplayer, which I didn't see when I was playing alone trying to build things or collect things. For example, sometimes we or the enemies would warp through solid walls, or the teleporters wouldn't work. It was annoying.

In one way I spoiled the game a bit by constantly referring to the wiki to see what we needed to collect next, and what we needed to do to face the next boss. However if I didn't do this, it would have taken hours of play to find things and figure things out, and I don't think we would have had the attention span to keep going.

And the hardest boss in the game, Duke Fishron, proved to be a bit too much of a challenge for us with the weapons we'd managed to build ourselves, and he killed us a bunch of times. So we had to (ahem) borrow some items to fight him on a more even footing. Even then, it took three attempts to learn how to beat him and finally take him down. How people solo that guy with crappy equipment I'll never know.